The efficiency of home heating solutions could be improved if it was possible to accurately predict when the home, or a part of the home, was going to be occupied. Existing home heating systems are typically programmable, allowing a user to specify two periods of the day when the heating is on (e.g. morning and evening). Irrespective of whether the home is occupied or not, the home will still be heated to the set point temperature set on a thermostat. Intelligent thermostats are available, so that the set point temperature can be varied at different times of day; however, these are often not programmed by users and again they do not address whether the home is occupied or not. A solution which has previously been proposed uses a person's location to predict the minimum time in which they could arrive home: if a person is an X minute drive time from their home, the person could be home in X minutes.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known occupancy prediction methods or to home heating applications.